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Captain FuKu

Posted 29 January 2004 - 06:47 AM

Alright, so I decided I should learn to use this mama or mame sooner or later, and my impression so far: it is not the most newbie friendly program to use. Still, we were all new at one point, no?

I've looked through the text documents (I'm speaking of msdos, as well as windows text doc); and skimmed through the technical jargon... and it seems like it doesn't inform the reader on how to even run the emulator in the first place.

In my folder, there are two applications: 1) mame32p and 2) mamep. What is the difference, and which one to pick? I dunno. I tried both. And when I tried to open mame32p, I get this message: "Error while DLL 'unicows.dll'! The application will terminate now." And when I try to open mamep, I get some brief mame usage info, and asked whether I'd like to open documentation (which I've already looked through), and whether I pick yes or no, the program closes.

Alright, at this point I assumed that I need to use MS-DOS prompt in order to open the emulator. So I went about and opened MS-DOS, and seeing as how I don't know how to use DOS (as sad as it sounds to many of you), I didn't get anywhere.

So, can any one here provide me with some step-by-step instructions -- keeping in mind that I've no clue how to use MAMA...err, MAME -- so I can run this thing?

And if that is too much work, can someone provide me with some websource tutorial on how to use DOS?

P.S. It's not that I'm impatient and dying to play this game -- I can just wait for the hacks on NRX or kawaks -- but I figured I should learn to use MAME sooner or later; especially since almost every newly released roms go straight to MAME.

Posted 29 January 2004 - 06:50 AM

Use Mame32p is the Windows(yes windows as in the UI) and theres a fix somewhere for that unicow.dll thing your talking about. I've read it on a number of other fourms. I think Mame32p is unaffected by the unicows.dll problem

Carnicero

Posted 29 January 2004 - 07:08 AM

Carnicero

Member

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96 posts

Gender:Male

I really suggest reverting back to regular MAME once the KOF2003 driver comes out. If you want to learn MAME, you'll want to use the real MAME. Otherwise you'll learn nothing but how to use the GUI and not the program itself.

Regular MAME is not nearly as complicated. It's all the Windows GUI junk that overcomplicates things.

Yes, MAME is a little unforgiving since it's originally a command line program and requires some tweaking and the user being familiar with working in the obsolete command line environment. Once you get the mame.ini settings to your preferences, there should be no reason whatsoever to even touch anything again.

Once you get into the prompt, it's just an issue of typing "mame zipname" (without the.zip extension). So Pacman would be "mame pacman". You can also add switches, like "mame kof94 -window" to run KOF94 in a window. The point of switches is to run a game with settings differently than the mame.ini specifies without changing the file. Sorta like a temporary setup. For small ROM collections, MAME is nice, but larger ones require you to remember a lot more zip names, which is why a lot of people switched to the GUI-based MAME32.

Switches are a pain, so it's normally a good idea to just create batch files. So you could create asteroid.bat to automatically run Asteriods with a bunch of switches for specific settings that might work better with vector games instead of raster games. Then you've got a whatever.bat file that will automatically run the game with a doubleclick of the icon, no longer requiring you to even open the command prompt. You could create a KOF2003.bat file on your desktop and just doubleclick to launch it.

Just holler if you need more help. I've switched fulltime to MAME about a year ago and know the ins and outs pretty well.

The file mame32p.exe launches only the user interface. The user interface only enters the command for you behind the scenes by launching with mamep.exe. The user interface basically just types "mamep kof2003" and adds whatever switches you toggled with the checkboxes in the options menus.

So you can skip the user interface completely and get a hang for using MAME by running mamep at the command line. This way you can get a feel for MAME without having to wait for an acceptable MAME build to surface.

Captain FuKu

Posted 29 January 2004 - 08:46 AM

Captain FuKu

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Premium Members

438 posts

Carnicero: Everything seemed to go well till I reached step 3. I typed in the name of the folder that mame32p is in after the "cd." Um... so the whole thing looked like this --> C:\>cd "insert name of folder"/MAME32.

Now, what happens when I type that is that I get this message: "Too many parameters - /MAME32." So, I guess this is where I'm stuck on...

Well, this is pretty fustrating and I think I may put this mame thing on the backburner for the time being. But if you have things to add, clarify, or anything, then just let me know.

K'dash: Ok, so what's with the unicow.dll thing? Does that mean something's wrong with the application? You mean when I try to open mame32p, (without DOS prompt and all) it's supposed to just open? I'm not supposed to get that error message, right?